Anamorphic lenses have been used in the motion picture industry since the 1953 introduction of Cinemascope. These lenses have the interesting property of focusing light from a scene as an image on a film with a first magnification in a vertical axis of the film, and a second magnification in a horizontal axis. Each image captured with such a lens appears distorted on the film, shrunken in the horizontal axis, but if projected onto a screen through a similar lens this distortion is removed as projected light forms an undistorted widescreen image on the screen.
Anamorphic lenses have not been commonly used with digital photography.